Last Sunday, I spoke on the necessity of knowing who Jesus Christ is and not just focusing solely on what Jesus Christ means to us.1 If we lose sight of who He really is—the Son of God—then we may be reduced to running after the God of our making or our meaning; a constant drive to reshape Him according to our measure and our fancy. The imperative, to know who Jesus Christ is, is a necessity because He who is Truth makes a demand on us—a demand which is moral and so prevents us from slipping into a solipsistic existence. At the same time his moral demand reminds us that Man’s existence cannot be organised narrowly along an egocentric principle2. Christ feeding the crowd tells us something about the nature of the multitude. The multitude is not extraneous to our existential condition but is sine qua non for the very possibility that we are individuals.3 An individual who has lost his mooring to the multitude will be cast upon the sea of meaninglessness constantly fishing for meaning.4
Knowing Who He is will ultimately lead to self-discovery5 and at the same time, will enable us to encounter others—they mirror Christ’s image too. The implication for Christians of knowing who Christ is is that we are forced to look closely at His constituted Body, namely, the divinely instituted Church. These few weeks where Christ gives Himself as the Bread of eternal life has led us to take a look at His Body, the Church, the universal sacrament of salvation.
It is not an easy task to look at the Church. Why is that so? We find our answer in the example of Elijah in the 1st Reading: Despair. I wager that like him, humanity is caught in the throes of dark despair. The nation is mired in depression and also in denial. So too Christians and in particular Catholics. Every human institution has failed us and in many ways, spectacularly. Each encounter with failure of an institution weakens the anchor of our trust in the collective whole. When institutional failure is also encountered in the Church, the effect is even more devastating. Many an unsteady faith is shaken by the glaring weakness of an institution that claims herself to be divinely instituted. This is because many do not make the distinction between, on the hand, the Church which, according to Lumen gentium, Christ had given as the universal instrument of salvation for multitude and on the other hand, the people, weak and sinful, who make up the Church. The Church as the universal sacrament of salvation is a powerful statement which many pluralist Catholic theologians struggle to accept. In an age of inclusivism and tolerance, how dare we claim that Jesus Christ saves Buddhists or Muslims? With Catholic theologians even doubting the universality of Christ’s salvation through the Church, our collective despair is compounded even more. Who can really save us? Not even Christ can.
Let me illustrate how far deep despair has eaten into our psyche?
We are told that the national crime rate has fallen. This is presently the boast of the government that it is fulfilling its promises.6 But, my concern is neither the fallen crime rate nor the fulfilment of a morally bankrupt government. My attention is directed to a blessing formulated for a victim of crime and oppression. It goes like this:
Lord God, your own Son was delivered into the hands of the wicked, yet he prayed for his persecutors and overcame hatred with the blood of the cross. Relieve the suffering of N.; grant him/her peace of mind and a renewed faith in your protection and care.
Imagine the instilled fear gathered from the myriad pictured emails of victims of crime. In a time of trauma, the furthest from our collective minds would be two abilities. Firstly, the belief in God’s providential protection. Closer to reality would be the question like “Where were you God when I was being robbed or stabbed”? Secondly, the desire to forgive would be non-existent. Instead of praying to forgive, a victim might wish that the two snatch thieves meet with an accident not life-threatening but render them totally incapacitated.
Why the lack of belief and why the inability to forgive? Our incapacities show us how myopic our horizon of the divine is. We do not really believe the divine anymore let alone fathom His providence. When belief in God fails, what happens is that existential despair will set in.
But consider this: no horizon beyond the temporal implies that we are forever stuck in this world with all scores to be settled before we die. Then Holy Communion might just as well be no more than merely bread. The Holy Communion we receive would be what the Filipinos call, borrowing from their Spanish heritage, “consuelo de bobo”. [Consolation of the stupid]. Nothing more than a pacifier you plug into a baby’s mouth to shut it. Ultimately, Holy Communion is meaningless.
However, the first reading tells us more. Elijah may have been given mere bread, but it kept him alive. In Christ and through His Church, we are promised not mere bread but the Bread of Eternal Life to keep our faith in God. And here, we must make the connexion between Whom we receive and who the Church really is because in many discussions of the topic of the Bread of Life we often forget a very important condition for the possibility of the Bread given to us: Holy Mother the Church.7 As instrument, the Church, by means of the gifts given to her by Christ, her doctrine, laws, and sacraments, makes communion with God possible.8 The Church as the sacrament of Christ makes His work of salvation visible and accessible to human beings.
In conclusion, an involvement with Church, through our apostolates, is not a favour to the Church. Once, when asked to attend a catechetical formation, I heard a Sunday school teacher express this sentiment, “I am already teaching catechism. What more does the parish want from me?” In our local Church context, attending BEC is not an extra-curricular activity. And even our Sunday collection is not an act of generosity. What we do for the Church is constitutive of who we are because it is from her we are fed the sacraments of Christ. Thus, the 2nd Reading makes so much sense. St Paul speaks of imitating Christ and that by being kind and compassionate to each other. We reform our lives, little by little and day by day, so that we do not become a sully to the good name of the Holy Church and in doing so become an effective part of Christ’s mission in the world.
1 It was not preached at any Mass. Written just for the blog.2 In the context of Christ feeding the multitude, the prevalence of world hunger in such a pervasive manner is symptomatic of how egocentric the world has become. We have food more than enough to eat. The point here is not about the sufficient quantity and therefore about the improvement our distribution or cutting our wastage so that there will be enough for simply living. The point is about our “attitude” which is patently self-centred. The irony of an egocentric world is that whilst it purports to compose the individual or to make the individual whole, the effect has actually led to his disintegration. Much of our preoccupation with being whole—cosmetic weight loss programmes or cosmetic augmentations, self-help techniques—has not led to greater happiness. Chasing the self for oneself exclusively can only lead to existential loneliness. This brings us to really ask how we can be whole—through the multitude. Caring, sharing and giving make us whole.3 A good example of the necessity of the multitude for the individual is expressed by someone who says “I don’t need anyone”. A person who does not need anyone is, in effect, condemned to silence. To give voice to the statement “I don’t need anyone” is to commit a performative contradiction because the speech contradicts the intent. Just saying I do not need anyone is already saying it to someone, thereby nullifying the intent that no one is needed.4 Knowing as an act is always directed to the Truth. To know is to know the Truth. In that sense, meaning is derived from the Truth and not the other way round. Meaning does not always arrive at the Truth. For example, an expression from a popular tune, “If loving you is wrong, then I don’t want to be right”. I was just thinking of this as I was driving and the radio played the song: “Help me make it through the night” by Kris Kristoffersen. The lyric is not explicit but you get the gist. I don't care what's right or wrong, I don't try to understand. Let the devil take tomorrow. Lord, tonight I need a friend. A good context for such lyrics’ expression is an adulterous relationship. Clearly, for someone in an adulterous relationship, even though it is wrong, it is meaningful. Thus, what is meaningful does not always express the Truth unless one defines meaning as embracing also the bad or the wrong. Listen to the song by Debbie Boone “You light up my life”. She says “It can’t be wrong when it feels so right”. Is that not how youths today reason? For many of us, the good or what is right are functions of our feelings.5 The Word was made flesh. The event describes that Christ came to be one of us. As an event it bears the hallmark temporality. It took place in time. But, creation was made through Him and was therefore made in His image and likeness. It is by contemplating Him that we discover who we are. We should model Him and not the other way around.6 Never mind that governance by its very definition means that the country is under the rule of law. The audacity to claim that crime rate has fallen is thoroughly an embarrassment. The fact is crime rate in a functioning democracy should always be low!!7 The wording of the Orates fratres is changed only by one word: Holy. The small change makes a world of a difference in our perception and appreciation of who the Church is: the ever Holy Bride of Christ our Lord.8 Therefore she is not just “structure” divided between “hierarchy” (therefore oppressor) and “laity” (therefore oppressed). She is also mission, sacraments and prayer. According to Pope Benedict, “Too many have become obsessed with changing church structures, patterns of ministry and the like, so that Church itself becomes of secondary importance. Ecclesiology becomes bogged down in a “battle about machinery”. The “real problem”, however, is the “crisis of faith”. The problem is not between hierarchy and laity. The problem arises when many, Bishops, priests and theologians, seeks to turn away from the Church’s theological attributes towards its political ones, whereby sociological theory dictates ecclesial organisation and the sacramental principle is replaced by ‘democratic control’. The Church is ontologically sacramental in nature and onlyconsequently hierarchical. Therefore, the hierarchy’s function is to serve the ontological nature of the Church. Forgetting this, we will be side-tracked to squabble about how the Church is to be organised or ignoring this, we will be tempted to focus merely on “mission”.
